A CNN chyron from this morning’s press conference:
Susan Rice, the Obama administration’s new U.N. Ambassador, was not the “Assistant Secretary of State for African American Affairs.” There is no such position at the State Department. From 1997–2001, Susan Rice was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.
Update:
The New York Times reports that Rice “was a point person in responding to Al Qaeda’s 1998 bombing of United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But her most searing experience was visiting Rwanda after the 1994 genocide when she was still on the N.S.C. staff”:
As she later described the scene, the hundreds, if not thousands, of decomposing, hacked up bodies that she saw haunted her and fueled a desire to never let it happen again.
“I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required,” she told The Atlantic Monthly in 2001. She eventually became a sharp critic of the Bush administration’s handling of the Darfur killings and last year testified before Congress on behalf of an American-led bombing campaign or naval blockade to force a recalcitrant Sudanese government to stop the slaughter.